This may turn into a Great Debate, but I’ll put it here for now.
Anyway six Medal of Honors have been awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they’ve all been posthumous. We’ve been fighting the War on Terror for almost ten years and you’d figure a living soldier would have received one by now.
Have the guidelines for receiving a Medal of Honor become so stringent that you almost literally have to die for one nowadays? Or has the nature of combat changed in such a way that the level of gallantry required to receive a Medal of Honor isn’t as commonly seen as it was in years past?
No answer, but according to this official website, about 60% of the Medals of Honor awarded since WWII have been awarded posthumously.
My dad joked that it was best to award the CMH to the dead so they wouldn’t turn around and do embarrassing stuff …
That’s not far off of the WWII average - by my count 57% of the Medals of Honor in that war were awarded posthumously.
Also, it’s much easier to do ‘heroic’ things when it’s a bunch of your soldiers fighting a bunch of enemy soldiers on a battlefield. When you’re in a ‘peacekeeper’ mode, patrolling around occupied cities, and the other side is mainly guerrilla fighters who blend in with the civilian population, it’s hard to be ‘heroic’. In fact, the enemy mostly avoids fights when possible – they are underdogs and prefer ambushes & IED’s.
Also, the technology of war has changed. Previously the officer would say to a company ‘we need you to charge up the hill and take that pillbox’, and in the face of overwhelming odds they did so, and some heroically. Now they would call in an unmanned drone plane, or remotely target artillery, etc., instead of risking the lives of soldiers on this. So much less opportunity for Medal-of-Honor level heroic actions.
Note that even in WWII, in the Pacific theatre, where the Japanese were often in defensive bunkers and fighting to the death, there were fewer MoH’s than in Europe, where it was more a clash of 2 armies. And Vietnam too, had fewer MoH’s awarded.
Well, it looks like there may finally be one:
That is not at all how Americans have fought wars in the past; certainly not in World War II. The American approach was to crush the enemy with overwhelming firepower wherever possible. American artillery was the defining weapons system of the American part of World War II; in Europe the US Army’s artillery was so overwhelming and ferocious that German soldiers believed the Americans had invented an automatic artillery gun. If you were fortunate enough to be near the coast the U.S. Navy’s big guns would get in on the fun as well. And if the weather was okay the Allies would bomb the snot out of you with aircraft just to be as sure as possible that you were either dead or really, really stunned. No sane American commander would engage in an attack without first calling upon a vast array of supporting arms.
Much of the answer to the OP’s question is just random chance. If you assume that Medal of Honor standards have been consistent and that you expect about 3 out of 5 recipients to die in the act for which they are honored, then 6 out of 6 dying is well within the bounds of normal chance. The Iraq War simply hasn’t seen enough battle to produce enough MoH recipients to determine, statistically, if the standards have changed. As long as the war has been it’s been very low intensity as compared to WWII, Korea, or Vietnam.
Did they not hand them out like candy during the Civil War?
I agree with
In WWII it was won for taking half a dozen machine gun nests or picking up a burning phosphorous shell and throwing it out a hole in the side of the airplane.
I am not an expert, but I don’t think that is a valid assumption, given that **20 **soldiers won the MoH for actions at Wounded Knee. :eek:
The standards HAVE changed it fact many MOH have been reovked.
Don’t think the troops in the field haven’t noticed, either: Where's the Respect?
Dr Mary E. Walker is the only woman to recieve a Medal of Honor. She was an surgeon (civilian contractor) for the Union Army during the Civil War. Her medal was one of the ones revoked in 1917 when standards changed, but she refused to return hers. President Carter later regranted it.
To quantify that a bit more, given 6 MoH recipients and each one having an independent 60% chance of dying in the process, the a priori chance of all six dying would only be about 4.7%. That’s not outside the bounds of plausibility, of course, but it’s certainly enough to take notice of.
It’s because we now have a kinder, gentler machine gun hand and if anyone gets hurt that isn’t nice.
Recently I heard someone say, “Real heroes are the guys who never make it home.”
More on this story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100701/ts_ynews/ynews_ts2997
I’m resurrecting this because it has, indeed, happened.
Let us all extend a salute to his heroism.
Agreed.
Hear, hear. Very impressive indeed.
These guys are so far from playing around that it’s not even worth discussing. Read the historical citations. A HUGE number of these guys got the award (mostly posthumously, obviously) for, literally, throwing themselves on grenades. Also a lot of single-handed storming of pillboxes. Bad, bad dudes.
Just one of many representative examples (from Korea):
Thanks, Marine.